Every painter who has ever looked at a sunset has reached for orange.

That is the first mistake.

Look at this cloud formation — the one I just finished in The Beauty Of The Settting Sun, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. The dominant impression is warmth. But warmth is not a color. It is a relationship between colors. The specific colors in that cloud mass — the ones that make it glow rather than simply appear yellow — are cadmium yellow deep, cadmium orange, yellow ochre, raw umber in the shadowed recesses, and near-white where the light catches the uppermost billowing forms most directly.

None of those are orange.

This painting did not come from a single photograph. It came from years of watching sunsets — a composite of observed cloud formations accumulated over time, informed by several photographs taken across several years, assembled into a composition that no single moment could have provided. The camera records what is there at one instant. This painting records what I have seen across many of them — the specific quality of light that exists when a setting sun illuminates the underside of a storm cloud formation over open water, distilled from years of looking into a single image.

This is the photograph principle taken to its logical conclusion. Not one reference modified. Many references — observed and photographed across years — assembled by the painter into something that never existed in front of a camera but is truer to the experience of that light than any single photograph could be.

I have been watching cloud formations for most of my life — from a farm in rural Kentucky, from the fantail of an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, from the window of my living room studio in Louisville. A botanist learns to read plant color without assumption. A surgeon learns to observe tissue without projection. A painter of clouds has to learn the same discipline applied to light — what is actually there, in this specific sky, at this specific moment, that I might be assuming rather than truly seeing.

This painting began with an underpainting in raw umber and Payne's gray — the broad cloud masses established in value before a single warm color was applied. The dark storm clouds that frame the luminous center mass were not added last as drama — they were established early, because the gold of the sunset cloud can only glow as brightly as the surrounding darkness allows it to. The luminosity of that cloud is not a property of the cloud itself. It is a relationship between the cloud and everything around it.

The ocean below presented a specific problem. A dark seascape in near-night conditions should appear almost black. But black water with light on it is not simply black — it carries the specific green-gold of reflected sunset light breaking across an uneven surface, each facet of the slight swell catching and releasing the warm cloud light from above. Painting that water required the same observation I bring to painting moonlight on water — not a single value, not a single color, but a sequence of temperature shifts and value variations that together read as light on moving water.

The rock formation at the lower right — barely visible, dark against the dark water — anchors the entire composition to a specific place. Without it the painting is a sky study. With it the viewer is standing somewhere, looking at something real.

Over the next few weeks I will be sharing the sequential photographs that document every stage of this painting — from the first underpainting marks to the finished canvas. Follow along if you want to understand not just what was painted but how and why each decision was made.

Magnificent Sunset is available for purchase. Contact [email protected] for details.

— Gorden McMurry, The Painting Physician
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